Managing multicultural teams harvard business review pdf

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Managing Multicultural Teams

by Jeanne Brett, Kristin Behfar, and Mary C. Kern

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Harvard Business Review

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The Idea in Brief—the core idea The Idea in Practice—putting the idea to work

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Article Summary

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Managing Multicultural Teams

A list of related materials, with annotations to guide further exploration of the article’s ideas and applications

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Further Reading

Teams whose members come from different nations and backgrounds place special demands on managers— especially when a feuding team looks to the boss for help with a conflict.

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Managing Multicultural Teams

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The Idea in Brief The Idea in Practice

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If your company does business internation- ally, you’re probably leading teams with members from diverse cultural back- grounds. Those differences can present serious obstacles. For example, some members’ lack of fluency in the team’s dominant language can lead others to underestimate their competence. When such obstacles arise, your team can stalemate.

To get the team moving again, avoid inter- vening directly, advise Brett, Behfar, and Kern. Though sometimes necessary, your involvement can prevent team members from solving problems themselves—and learning from that process.

Instead, choose one of three indirect inter- ventions. When possible, encourage team members to adapt by acknowledging cul- tural gaps and working around them. If your team isn’t able to be open about their differences, consider structural interven- tion (e.g., reassigning members to reduce interpersonal friction). As a last resort, use an exit strategy (e.g., removing a member from the team).

There’s no one right way to tackle multicul- tural problems. But understanding four barriers to team success can help you begin evaluating possible responses.

FOUR BARRIERS

The following cultural differences can cause destructive conflicts in a team:

• Direct versus indirect communication. Some team members use direct, explicit communication while others are indirect, for example, asking questions instead of pointing out problems with a project. When members see such differences as violations of their culture’s communication norms, relationships can suffer.

• Trouble with accents and fluency. Mem- bers who aren’t fluent in the team’s dominant language may have difficulty communicating their knowledge. This can prevent the team from using their expertise and create frustration or perceptions of incompetence.

• Differing attitudes toward hierarchy. Team members from hierarchical cultures expect to be treated differently according to their status in the organization. Members from egalitarian cultures do not. Failure of some members to honor those expectations can cause humiliation or loss of stature and credibility.

• Conflicting decision-making norms. Members vary in how quickly they make decisions and in how much analysis they require beforehand. Someone who prefers making decisions quickly may grow frus- trated with those who need more time.

FOUR INTERVENTIONS

Your team’s unique circumstances can help you determine how to respond to multicul- tural conflicts. Consider these options:

Intervention Type When to Use Example Adaptation: working with or around diff erences

Members are willing to acknowledge cultural diff erences and fi gure out how to live with them.

An American engineer working on a team that included Israelis was shocked by their in-your-face, argumentative style. Once he noticed they confronted each other and not just him—and still worked well together—he realized confrontations weren’t personal attacks and accepted their style.

Structural intervention: reorganizing to reduce friction

The team has obvious subgroups, or members cling to negative stereotypes of one another.

An international research team’s leader realized that when he led meetings, members “shut down” because they felt intimidated by his executive status. After he hired a consultant to run future meetings, members participated more.

Managerial intervention: making fi nal decisions without team involvement

Rarely; for instance, a new team needs guidance in establishing productive norms.

A software development team’s lingua franca was English, but some members spoke with pronounced accents. The manager explained they’d been chosen for their task expertise, not fl uency in English. And she directed them to tell customers: “I realize I have an accent. If you don’t understand what I’m saying, just stop me and ask questions.”

Exit: voluntary or involuntary removal of a team member

Emotions are running high, and too much face has been lost on both sides to salvage the situation.

When two members of a multicultural consulting team couldn’t resolve their disagreement over how to approach problems, one member left the fi rm.

Managing Multicultural Teams

by Jeanne Brett, Kristin Behfar, and Mary C. Kern

harvard business review • november 2006 page 2

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Teams whose members come from different nations and backgrounds place special demands on managers—especially when a feuding team looks to the boss for help with a conflict.

When a major international software devel- oper needed to produce a new product quickly, the project manager assembled a team of employees from India and the United States. From the start the team members could not agree on a delivery date for the product. The Americans thought the work could be done in two to three weeks; the Indi- ans predicted it would take two to three months. As time went on, the Indian team members proved reluctant to report setbacks in the production process, which the Ameri- can team members would find out about only when work was due to be passed to them. Such conflicts, of course, may affect any team, but in this case they arose from cultural differ- ences. As tensions mounted, conflict over de- livery dates and feedback became personal, disrupting team members’ communication about even mundane issues. The project manager decided he had to intervene—with the result that both the American and the Indian team members came to rely on him for direction regarding minute operational

details that the team should have been able to handle itself. The manager became so bogged down by quotidian issues that the project ca- reened hopelessly off even the most pessimis- tic schedule—and the team never learned to work together effectively.

Multicultural teams often generate frus- trating management dilemmas. Cultural dif- ferences can create substantial obstacles to effective teamwork—but these may be sub- tle and difficult to recognize until significant damage has already been done. As in the case above, which the manager involved told us about, managers may create more prob- lems than they resolve by intervening. The challenge in managing multicultural teams effectively is to recognize underlying cul- tural causes of conflict, and to intervene in ways that both get the team back on track and empower its members to deal with future challenges themselves.

We interviewed managers and members of multicultural teams from all over the world. These interviews, combined with our deep

Managing Multicultural Teams

harvard business review • november 2006 page 3

research on dispute resolution and teamwork, led us to conclude that the wrong kind of man- agerial intervention may sideline valuable members who should be participating or, worse, create resistance, resulting in poor team performance. We’re not talking here about re- specting differing national standards for doing business, such as accounting practices. We’re referring to day-to-day working problems among team members that can keep multicul- tural teams from realizing the very gains they were set up to harvest, such as knowledge of different product markets, culturally sensitive customer service, and 24-hour work rotations.

The good news is that cultural challenges are manageable if managers and team mem- bers choose the right strategy and avoid imposing single-culture-based approaches on multicultural situations.

The Challenges

People tend to assume that challenges on mul- ticultural teams arise from differing styles of communication. But this is only one of the four categories that, according to our research, can create barriers to a team’s ultimate suc- cess. These categories are direct versus indi- rect communication; trouble with accents and fluency; differing attitudes toward hierarchy and authority; and conflicting norms for decision making.

Direct versus indirect communication. Communication in Western cultures is typi- cally direct and explicit. The meaning is on the surface, and a listener doesn’t have to know much about the context or the speaker to interpret it. This is not true in many other cultures, where meaning is embedded in the way the message is presented. For example, Western negotiators get crucial information about the other party’s preferences and prior- ities by asking direct questions, such as “Do you prefer option A or option B?” In cultures that use indirect communication, negotiators may have to infer preferences and priorities from changes—or the lack of them—in the other party’s settlement proposal. In cross- cultural negotiations, the non-Westerner can understand the direct communications of the Westerner, but the Westerner has difficulty understanding the indirect communications of the non-Westerner.

An American manager who was leading a project to build an interface for a U.S. and

Japanese customer-data system explained the problems her team was having this way: “In Japan, they want to talk and discuss. Then we take a break and they talk within the organi- zation. They want to make sure that there’s harmony in the rest of the organization. One of the hardest lessons for me was when I thought they were saying yes but they just meant ‘I’m listening to you.’”

The differences between direct and indirect communication can cause serious damage to relationships when team projects run into problems. When the American manager quoted above discovered that several flaws in the system would significantly disrupt com- pany operations, she pointed this out in an e-mail to her American boss and the Japanese team members. Her boss appreciated the direct warnings; her Japanese colleagues were embarrassed, because she had violated their norms for uncovering and discussing prob- lems. Their reaction was to provide her with less access to the people and information she needed to monitor progress. They would probably have responded better if she had pointed out the problems indirectly—for example, by asking them what would happen if a certain part of the system was not func- tioning properly, even though she knew full well that it was malfunctioning and also what the implications were.

As our research indicates is so often true, communication challenges create barriers to effective teamwork by reducing information sharing, creating interpersonal conflict, or both. In Japan, a typical response to direct confrontation is to isolate the norm violator. This American manager was isolated not just socially but also physically. She told us, “They literally put my office in a storage room, where I had desks stacked from floor to ceil- ing and I was the only person there. So they totally isolated me, which was a pretty loud signal to me that I was not a part of the inside circle and that they would communicate with me only as needed.”

Her direct approach had been intended to solve a problem, and in one sense, it did, be- cause her project was launched problem- free. But her norm violations exacerbated the challenges of working with her Japanese colleagues and limited her ability to uncover any other problems that might have derailed the project later on.

Jeanne Brett

is the DeWitt W. Buchanan, Jr., Distinguished Professor of Dispute Resolution and Organizations and the director of the Dispute Resolution Research Center at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management in Evanston, Illinois. Kristin Behfar is an assistant professor at the Paul Merage School of Business at the University of California at Irvine. Mary C. Kern is an assistant professor at the Zicklin School of Busi- ness at Baruch College in New York.